Introduction
In recent years, the formation of publics has increasingly occupied the attention of historians of Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean alike.Footnote 1 A crucial complicating factor in the formation of these Asian and African publics was the initial introduction of print technology by European missionaries and administrators. This external factor was further complicated by additional legal and communicational considerations by way of variant regimes of press freedom or censorship under different empires, on the one hand, and the use of new steamship and postal services to overcome any such local restrictions on the other.Footnote 2 Because print technology spread first to the Indian Ocean’s port cities – many of which remained the distribution centers of publics they helped create – the importing of publications from other regions around the ocean meant that such publics were inherently porous, particularly with regard to transregional languages (such as Arabic) and diasporic languages (such as Gujarati). By tracing the introduction of print technology, the importing of books and journals, the impact of multilingual readerships, and the profile of printed disputes on Zanzibar from the 1860s to the 1930s, this article draws attention to the gaps that emerged between print and public in what was notionally the most “cosmopolitan” and “connected” place in East Africa.
There now exists an abundant scholarship on “public spheres,” “publics,” and “print networks,” whether for different corners of the Indian Ocean or the Islamic world more broadly. A public sphere can be simply defined as “the social space in which different opinions are expressed.”Footnote 3 However, the classic formulation of the concept of the public sphere developed by the late Jürgen Habermas refers to a field between a market-based society and tax-based state in which the development of rational and peaceful forms of debate might promote the emergence of political freedoms.Footnote 4 The normative aspects of the Habermasian model prompted some scholars to adopt a less restrictive concept of a “public.” As Valeska Huber and Jürgen Osterhammel have argued, “In contrast to the demanding criteria that define a public sphere, publics are not necessarily linked to a particular political system. They do not have to be seen as social configurations that generate political meaning and political activism.”Footnote 5 Huber and Osterhammel have used this less restrictive framework to develop the concept of a “global public,” which they define as “a very large group, dispersed transnationally and, mostly, transcontinentally. Its members are, as a general rule, unknown to each other, but share a common focus of attention.”Footnote 6 Whereas such publics (and global publics) can be based on many different modes of communication and types of media, the model of a “print network” has enabled more focused research on the specific geographical nodes and participants linked together by the distribution of printed texts.
While each of these conceptual models has its analytical advantages, none quite captures the complexities of Zanzibar. The problem with the concepts of public sphere and public alike is the key criterion that Huber and Osterhammel usefully call “a common focus of attention.” For the sheer variety of languages used in Zanzibar – whether for oral communication, literate education, or textual publication – precludes any easy assumption of such shared attention among the island’s distinct communities of Omanis, Hadramis, Indians, Swahilis, and other Africans, who followed not only Ibadi, Sunni, Isma‘ili, and Twelver Shi‘i versions of Islam but also Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. To assume the existence of such common concerns becomes even more problematic when we turn to the printed texts that circulated through Zanzibar, many if not most of which were written in languages, scripts, and registers that were only legible or meaningful to a minority of literate members of each community, presenting further challenges to the notion of shared subjects of debate and concern on which the models of public sphere and public are predicated. The relatively greater investments in Arabic, Gujarati, Urdu, and English printing as compared to the development of printing in Swahili (especially on Muslim topics) renders a “common focus of attention” yet more elusive, given that Swahili was known to a far larger (albeit nonliterate) proportion of Zanzibar’s population than the preferred languages of print.
However, parts of Huber and Osterhammel’s model are still helpful for Zanzibar, since the printed texts that moved in and out of the island were “dispersed transnationally and, mostly, transcontinentally.”Footnote 7 Indeed, the variety of multilingual and multiscript printed texts that circulated through Zanzibar was largely enabled by the transcontinental profile of their underlying print networks. Neither printing Arabic texts on Ibadi doctrine or printing Gujarati texts on Isma‘ili doctrine made practical sense if they had to be distributed on Zanzibar alone. By contrast, the ability to export Ibadi texts printed in Zanzibar to Libya, and to import Isma‘ili texts printed in India, provided a rationale for the mass production of texts through print rather than copying individual copies of manuscripts for miniscule local readerships. Consequently, as we will see more fully in the following sections, the convergence of multilingual and multiscript print networks on Zanzibar was a product of the island’s integration into steamship and postal networks that reached across the Indian Ocean into the Mediterranean.
If the model of “print networks” seems the best fit for Zanzibar, it too has limitations in its greater attention to the production and distribution of texts rather than to the social and political consequences of such shared forms of communication with which scholars of public spheres and publics have been more concerned. By combining these existing models, this article therefore argues that Zanzibar can be seen as a case study of the convergence of discrete diasporic publics. Despite extensive critiques of the concept of diaspora, the term “diasporic” is used advisedly here.Footnote 8 For its core criteria of dispersion, homeland orientation, and boundary-maintenance capture a crucial characteristic of the print materials that flowed in and out of Zanzibar.Footnote 9 For whether in terms of the geography of patronage and other capital flows; the location of pilgrimage sites, religious leaders, and communal educational institutions; or the focus of news reports, history-writing, and other forms of textual commemoration, the Zanzibar communities who made use of print showed a marked orientation to their specific homelands, whether actual, ancestral, or even imaginary, while the linguistic and orthographic distinctions of their widely dispersed publications created even greater boundaries in the printed than the social realm.
Nevertheless, to avoid essentializing the notion of Indian Ocean diasporas, it is important to recognize the historicity of Zanzibar’s diaspora communities and their discrete diasporic publics as social processes in time. Here the temporal approach to diaspora developed by Shelly Chan proves helpful.Footnote 10 As Chan explains, the concept of
diaspora has mainly developed as a spatial concept to challenge territorially bounded understandings of nation, culture, and identity. But the focus on space has largely eclipsed an attention to time. Situated in time, diaspora is less a collection of communities than a series of moments in which reconnections with a putative homeland take place. Typically, diaspora moments involve references to essential roots and ties. Yet their actual meanings are always subject to open interpretation. Rising and falling in relation to a shifting world, diaspora moments transform the self or group in question into an intermediary between two reified centers of power, such as national and global, native and foreign, thereby generating new knowledge and agendas. What is always at stake, then, is who is making diaspora assertions, both positively and negatively, and to what ends. Temporally inflected, diaspora is a process to reckon with a world in flux through turning and returning to a fixed origin, hence a useful paradigm for analysis.Footnote 11
Building on Chan’s intervention, the model proposed here of discrete diasporic publics is one which is historically contingent, shaped by law, patronage, and literacy, along with variable access to technology, capital, and distribution mechanisms. Instead of fixing and reifying diasporic identities, this model implies that diasporic characteristics (homeland orientation and boundary-maintenance especially) were shaped by the variable engagements of different community members with print materials in their separate communal language.
Rather than conceptually unify the writers and readers of texts published in different languages and scripts, the model of discrete diasporic publics highlights divergences between the focuses of attention of different reading publics on Zanzibar. Which is to say that different communities on Zanzibar may not so much have shared a “common focus of attention” in Huber and Osterhammel’s terms so much as a series of different communal focuses of attention.
Zanzibar as a communication hub
The rise of diasporic printed publics on Zanzibar was inseparable from the growth of more efficient transport systems that made it far easier to maintain or reestablish contact with diasporic homelands. This involved steamships and in turn postal systems. Zanzibar pioneered the introduction of steam travel to East Africa, integrating the island with a network of steam ports that was initially centered on Calcutta but soon reached northwards to the Mediterranean with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The early 1870s saw the Calcutta-based British India Steam Navigation inaugurate a Zanzibar service, with Sultan Barghash bin Sa‘id (r. 1870–88) following suit later in the decade with the purchase of six steamships from German and Scottish shipbuilders. Within twenty years, Zanzibar was also being served by the French Messageries Maritimes, the German Deutsch Ost-Afrika line and the Portuguese Mala Real Portugueza, along with British P&O steamships.Footnote 12 With the launch of the Nippon Suisan Kaisha steamship service, Zanzibar’s connections with Bombay and thence Singapore ultimately reached as far as Japan where Gujarati Isma‘ili and Hindu merchants had also established themselves.
These far-reaching commercial steamship lines were important for communication no less than trade, particularly in terms of mail. After the British administration opened a Post Office Department on Zanzibar in 1891, the island’s incorporation into the Universal Postal Union in 1895 enabled steamship companies to affordably transport letters and packets across the ocean as far as Japan.Footnote 13 Aside from personal and business correspondence, this was also an infrastructure for the movement of ideas and identities. In 1899 some 220,460 letters and newspapers were dispatched from Zanzibar and some 516,002 letters and book packets delivered there, suggesting a larger flow of books and written material into Zanzibar than out of it.Footnote 14 In 1904, the Sultan’s private physician Dr. Alfred Spurrier launched the Zanzibar Book Club, which he advertised as “open to members of all communities,” so long of course that they spoke English.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, the combination of steam, print, and post enabled books in various other languages to flow in and out of Zanzibar, linking its various Indian and Arab communities to other centers of printing so as to generate linguistically discrete diasporic publics in East Africa. But before we turn to these diasporic currents, we must first take a more detailed look at the society that generated them, particularly by surveying the commercial and religious institutions around which social – and to a considerable extent intellectual – life was structured in Zanzibar.
As in other regions around the ocean, it was Protestant missionaries who were responsible for the beginning of printing in Zanzibar. As had previously been the case in the British colonial ports of Calcutta, Columbo, and Rangoon, this involved the promotion of what the missionaries regarded as more accessible “vernacular” languages for translating the Christian Scriptures. In some cases, as with Edward Sell, who previously published Urdu Christian texts in Madras, India-based missionaries turned their attention to new proselytizing pastures of East Africa.Footnote 16 But in 1865 the first text to be printed on Zanzibar comprised early sections of Edward Steere’s Handbook of Swahili. Earlier that year, Steere had founded the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) press in Kiungani, near Zanzibar’s principal town and port, Stone Town. As an aid for scripture translation and preaching, the handbook was followed in 1868 by the first Swahili portions of the Bible to be printed in Zanzibar by way of the Books of Ruth and Jonah, then the Gospel of Luke four years later.Footnote 17 Strictly speaking these were not the first Swahili printed texts as such: in 1844 Steere’s German missionary colleague Johann Ludwig Krapf had printed parts of the Book of Genesis in the East African mainland port of Mombasa as the first ever Swahili printed text. Nonetheless, it was the UMCA Press that served as the catalyst for the subsequent development of printing on Zanzibar.Footnote 18
A decade after these Swahili Bible translations were printed, Sultan Barghash responded by founding Zanzibar’s first Arabic and Muslim press.Footnote 19 Before founding his press, during the 1860s the sultan had been exiled for two years to Bombay, where he had witnessed the Arabic and Arabic-script publishing that had been developing there for the past forty years.Footnote 20 Then, in 1875, as part of an official visit to Europe, Sultan Barghash passed through the epicenter of Arabic publishing in Cairo, lending him further encouragement to establish what in 1879 would become his Matba’ al-Sultaniyya (Sultanate Press), which was staffed with Lebanese Arabs imported along with the printing equipment.Footnote 21
Just under a decade later, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa published Msimulizi (“News Bearer”), the first newspaper in East Africa and Swahili, edited by African students at Zanzibar’s Kiungani College and modeled on the Christian missionary journals of India.Footnote 22 In 1892, two years after the British Protectorate was declared, the commercially oriented Gazette for Zanzibar and East Africa made its first weekly appearance.Footnote 23 By 1901, there was also an Indian trade-related newspaper published in Zanzibar by way of the Samachar (“News”), edited by Fazel J. Master in English and Gujarati and styled after the pioneering Bombay Gujarati newspaper of the same name.Footnote 24 Further south in the port of Durban in Natal Colony (part of South Africa from 1911), two years later the Indian Opinion newspaper was launched with articles in English, Gujarati, Tamil, and Hindi, while in Cape Town Muslim publishing was already underway as Ottoman teachers promoted the use of Afrikaans in Arabic-script.Footnote 25
From proselytizing print to public polemic
The establishment of Sultan Barghash’s printing enterprise in 1879 had been no more a commercial enterprise than the Christian missionary ventures that preceded it, for the Sultanate Press was devoted mainly to printing legal and other works belonging to the Ibadi branch of Islam to which the Omani ruling class belonged.Footnote 26 But the press was a recognition and response to the Christian missionaries by adapting their printing methods to safeguard Ibadism from the teachings of the rival Christian elite. The first publication of the Sultanate Press, staggered over a period of seven years, was the colossal Qamus al-Shari‘a (“The Ocean of Law”), which comprised a complete system of Ibadi theology and law in ninety volumes, of which only nineteen were ultimately printed. Over the next few decades, the Sultanate Press continued to promote the Ibadi Islam of the ruling house by making available such canonical texts as a version of an eighth-century Ibadi Hadith collection and the eleventh-century Ibadi legal compendium known as al-Mukhtasar (“The Abridgement”).Footnote 27 Sultan Barghash was influenced by the short-lived Ibadi state in Oman of ‘Azzan ibn Qais (r. 1868–71), which coincided with the early years of Sultan Barghash’s reign on Zanzibar.Footnote 28 Amid the more widespread Sunni Shafi‘i traditions of the East African coast, Sultan Barghash’s new port-city outpost of Ibadism on Zanzibar bore more than a superficial resemblance to the proselytizing ventures of the Protestant missionaries, whose activities he knew well. But the Sultanate Press also served to foster closer ties between what was in this period meaningfully becoming an Ibadi diaspora that maintained or even fostered anew a shared sense of common identity while maintaining or indeed increasing boundaries with non-Ibadi Muslims. The links that the Sultan and fellow Omani Arabs on Zanzibar established with Ibadis in Oman and even Libya through print also echoed the way Muslims on the Maldive Islands and Ceylon used new print networks to forge ties and identifications with Arab Muslims in Egypt.Footnote 29
However, at the same time as trying to promote an Ibadi revival, Sultan Barghash was forced to rely on the larger number of Sunni Arab scholars to staff his expanding legal and bureaucratic system. These ties of interdependence helped foster cooperative albeit patron-client relations between Zanzibar’s smaller community of ruling Ibadis and the larger Sunni community. Even so, the island was by no means free from sectarian disputes. Various Sunni religious figures on the nearby East African mainland were vocally critical of the Ibadis, making concerted efforts to convert the Ibadis that spilled over onto Zanzibar.Footnote 30 The most prominent converts were the leading members of the Mazru’i family, which had held high political and religious influence along the Swahili coast since the seventeenth century.Footnote 31 The tensions caused by Sunni proselytization worsened under Sultan Barghash, who was pursuing his competing project to promote a diasporic Ibadi nahda (“renaissance”) through his state press and wider sponsorship of immigrant and overseas Ibadi scholars.Footnote 32 Barghash thus promoted the young Ibadi religious scholar, Shaykh ‘Ali ibn Khamis al-Barwani (1852–85), who composed poems for each of the Ibadi books on the Sultanate Press. But when al-Barwani converted to Sunnism, Barghash had him imprisoned, physically punished, then eventually deported to Oman, where he died of his injuries.Footnote 33 On Zanzibar, the act of conversion that often resulted from the sympathetic study of another religious system carried heavy social and sometimes legal consequences. Echoing what seem to have been the more restricted religious freedoms on Zanzibar as a protectorate rather than as a full colony, conversion was similarly illegal in the Maldive Islands, which became a British Protectorate in 1887.
Meanwhile, in 1877, the decision by prominent Swahili religious teacher Shaykh ‘Ali al-Mazru’i to preach Sunnism on Zanzibar’s sister island of Pemba (also ruled by Sultan Barghash) led the latter to imprison him too.Footnote 34 After members of the Mundhiri family – long celebrated for their Ibadi learning – also converted to Sunnism, several royally sponsored Ibadis responded by writing defenses of Ibadism, such as the 1899 Sirat al-Mustaqim (“The Straight Path”), that sought to confute Sunni polemics.Footnote 35 While Zanzibar’s apparently more controlled publics did not allow the wave of polemical publications that washed over from India to Burma and Ceylon, sectarian exchanges between the island’s Sunni and Ibadi Arabs show that similar tensions also existed there. Whether such conflicts were coeval with the emergence of Zanzibar’s printed publics, or whether Zanzibar’s publics were more regulated in an attempt to suppress such conflicts, is a matter that requires closer examination. We will return to the question of law below. For now, it is important to recognize how such Ibadi-Sunni conflicts and polemics served to maintain or increase boundaries between the Protectorate’s Omani and Hadrami Arabs, both of whom were increasingly in communication with their homelands and diasporas through print, post, and steam travel.
The existence of Sultan Barghash’s state-funded press did not mean that Sunni books were unavailable on Zanzibar. With the Ibadi-controlled Sultanate Press dominating Arabic printing on Zanzibar itself, the island’s trading ties with many other ports around the Indian Ocean meant that Sufi and Salafi books were imported from other printing centers, such as Bombay and Singapore, where Hadrami Arab religious teachers had previously established themselves under the more liberal press rules of formal British colonies. Many of the books imported to Zanzibar were classical works of Sunni Sufism, such as Bidayat al-Hidaya (“The Beginning of Guidance”) by al-Ghazali (c. 1058–1111), which had been published in Singapore along with al-Maraqi al-‘Ubudiyya (“The High Places of Servanthood”) by the Southeast Asian scholar Muhammad Nawawi al-Jawi (1813–97), which was printed in its margins.Footnote 36 Issued by the Dar al-Taba‘a al-Marjan (“Coral Printing House”) on Basra Street in Singapore’s Hadrami Arab quarter, Bidayat al-Hidaya was only one of many such works imported to Zanzibar to circumvent the pro-Ibadi policies of the Sultanate Press and the wider attempts of Sultan Barghash to undermine the authority of Hadrami religious teachers (included Hadramis from the Comoros Islands) affiliated to Sunni Sufi orders which were gaining influence in various regions of the Indian Ocean.Footnote 37
Many of the Sunnis resident on Zanzibar were themselves first- or second-generation Hadrami Arab migrants from Yemen or the Comoros Islands, whose improved transport links to printing centers such as Singapore, Bombay, and Cairo enabled them to have books published beyond Sultan Barghash’s dominions. These Hadrami religious leaders promoted a more textualist and reformist model of Islam that undermined the customary practices of Zanzibar’s Swahili Muslims and their own religious leaders.Footnote 38 One such Hadrami teacher was Ahmad ibn Sumayt (1861–1925), the chief Sunni qadi (judge) of Zanzibar, who had his works published by the Miriyya Press in Ottoman-ruled Mecca in 1897, then subsequently in British-ruled Cairo in 1913.Footnote 39 Even so, Ibn Sumayt was one of only a handful of Zanzibar-based Sunni scholars who managed to have his work printed during this period when the Sultanate Press only issued books supporting Ibadi doctrine.Footnote 40
From around 1900, the majority of Arabic books being imported to Zanzibar were being printed in Cairo, particularly by the al-Babi al-Halabi family of printers, whose books were carried south via the Suez Canal on trading ships.Footnote 41 This was a consequence of the presence in Cairo especially at the great seminary of al-Azhar of an increasing number of Sunni students and scholars from Zanzibar, some of whom had their own books printed in Cairo. These new intellectual itineraries resulted from Zanzibar’s closer integration into the steamship networks that connected Stone Town to the Suez and its associated railway to Cairo, allowing for the cheaper and easier transport of people as well as books. Other Sunni printed books had even more circuitous oceanic itineraries before reaching Zanzibar, as in the case of the eighteenth-century Arabic Sufi work, al-Risala al-Jami‘a (“Comprehensive Treatise”), which was translated into Malay and printed in Dutch-ruled Batavia in 1875 then subsequently reprinted in Zanzibar in 1925 in a trilingual Arabic-Swahili-English edition.Footnote 42 By this time, as we will see below, a new generation of Arab and Indian proselytizers was using print to promote Sunnism among the Swahili-speaking African population.
From imported journals to local organizations
The commercial mail service formalized by the British establishment of a Post Office on Zanzibar in 1891 allowed for the inexpensive importing of journals as well as books. This had further impact by coinciding with the emergence in Egypt of postal subscription-based Arabic journals, such as al-Manar (“The Lighthouse,” founded in 1898), the pioneering Salafi publication edited from Cairo by the Lebanese opinion-leader Rashid Rida (1865–1935), which was also read by Muslims in India, Ceylon, and Singapore. One such Zanzibari subscriber to al-Manar was Sayyid Mansab ibn ‘Ali (1863–1927), who also subscribed to the Beirut-printed journals al-Hilal (“Crescent Moon”) and al-Muqtataf (“Selection”), along with two Cairene newspapers by way of the nationalist al-Liwa (“The Standard”) and the Pan-Islamist al-Mu‘ayyad (“The Strengthened”).Footnote 43 For someone so in tune with ideas arriving from across the water, Sayyid Mansab appropriately spent most of his career as the preacher of Stone Town’s Forodhani Juma‘ (“Wharf Mosque”).Footnote 44 Imported from Cairo, the Salafi ideas promoted on Zanzibar by such subscribers to al-Manar were frequently at odds with the region’s older religious traditions, not least the veneration of Sufi masters and pilgrimages to their shrines.
Access to ideas imported in Arabic journals from the Middle East thus helped generate disputes of the kind that accompanied the spread of print-mediated Salafi religious reform elsewhere around the Indian Ocean.Footnote 45 While the importing of books and journals was certainly a sign of connection, its outcomes were disputational and boundary-making. Certainly, there were figures such as the Ibadi chief qadi of Zanzibar, Nasir al-Bahlani (1860–1920), who between 1910 and 1914 used his contributions to the island’s first Arabic newspaper, al-Najah (“Victory”), to try to persuade fellow Ibadis to establish connections with Sunni reformist Salafis in Egypt.Footnote 46 But the impact of the Salafi ideas imported to Zanzibar by such Egyptian journals as al-Manar led to tensions through the rise of both local Sunni and Ibadi Salafists in Zanzibar, who used the expanding Arabic-based public to voice their criticisms of established religious leaders and local religious customs.Footnote 47 Already in the early 1900s, the Hadrami circle around Ibn Sumayt issued a fatwa, or legal opinion, that the chanting of litanies led by Qadiri Sufi masters on Zanzibar amounted to the promotion of “dancing societies” – using the Swahili word ngoma, linked with African drumming practices which immigrant Hadramis viewed with disdain.Footnote 48 As historian Daren Ray has explained, in response to Hadrami criticisms of their version of Islam, Swahili religious teachers “began to distinguish between local traditions (desturi) and a new word for culture (utamaduni), drawn from an Arabic word that emphasized urbanity.”Footnote 49 Imported religious ideas led to substantive local social changes, then, especially when promoted by new organizations.
Against this background, the rise of Arab nationalism around the Mediterranean fostered responses from Zanzibar, where the Arab Association (founded in 1911) began publishing al-Falaq (“The Dawn”) newspaper in 1919.Footnote 50 As an Arabic-based medium for connecting Zanzibar’s Arabs with a larger and distant “coethnic” community, al-Falaq added another diasporic dimension to the island’s fractured publics that did not so much dissolve and unify Omani and Hadrami communities but added a further layer of identification. By the 1920s, other new organizations were being founded to promote reformist religious doctrines being imported to Zanzibar. The year 1922 saw the founding of al-Jamiyyat al-Islamiyya by Salim ibn Sa‘id al-Shuhaybi, a former Ibadi Muslim who converted to Shafi‘i Sunnism.Footnote 51 Influenced by al-Manar, it was Zanzibar’s first Salafi organization. Five years later, more Sufi-oriented scholars who had read al-Manar and called for social reform but refused to reject all aspects of Sufi teaching, founded the rival al-Jamiyyat al-Sunna (“Society of Prophetic Custom”) organization, which was far more sympathetic to the Sufi traditions of East Africa.Footnote 52 As historian James R. Brennan has noted, as these new “organizational forms flourished in colonial East Africa [they] became cockpits of contestation, often more racial than sectarian, over local religious and political authority.”Footnote 53 These organizations and their publications thus involved contests over the sole validity of one version of Islam versus all others.
By around 1930, new Salafi-inspired journals, such as the Swahili al-Sahifa (“The Page”) and the Swahili-Arabic al-Islah (“Reform”), founded by Shaykh al-Amin al-Mazru’i in 1930 and 1932 respectively, encouraged Swahili Muslims on Zanzibar and the East African mainland alike to deny their local religious traditions.Footnote 54 Islah was a very voguish term by the 1930s, having already served as the title of a series of different periodicals: there were at least four Persian Islah journals (issued in the 1910s and 20s from Bombay, Tehran, and Kabul); an influential Uzbek iteration (issued from 1915 in Tashkent); three journals sharing the title in Urdu (issued from 1932 in Lucknow, from 1934 in Lahore, and from 1936 in Azamgarh); and another al-Islah in Bengali (issued from 1932 in Sylhet).Footnote 55 By 1933, a Maldivian al-Islah was launched as the first journal printed in Dhivehi. However, the most influential al-Islah was the one printed in Mecca from 1928 by Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi (1892–1959), an Egyptian Salafi (and student of Muhammad ‘Abduh).Footnote 56 It was likely this journal that inspired al-Mazru’i.
While al-Mazru’i’s journals were imported to Zanzibar, they were printed in the port city of Mombasa in what was by then the formal British colony of Kenya. In 1930 al-Mazru’i had also established the Swahili newspaper Uwongozi (“Guidance”), also in Mombasa, deploying print as an effective vehicle for criticizing local customs and castigating the religious leaders who upheld them.Footnote 57 Among the various elements of local religious culture that al-Mazru’i criticized, none was more contentious than the mawlid i (“birthday”) festivities celebrating the birth of the Prophet which had long been central to both popular and learned piety along the Swahili coast.Footnote 58 Zanzibar’s connections to other print-based publics emerging in other British-ruled ports around the Indian Ocean also empowered the mawlid i rituals themselves through reproductions of the famous long poem on the mawlid written by al-Barzanji (d. 1764): copies were even printed for export in Singapore.Footnote 59 Once again, we see how a public acted as a “social space in which different opinions are expressed.”Footnote 60
The promotion of Salafism from Mombasa reflected developments in the British ruled port of Aden, which until 1937 was ruled as part of India.Footnote 61 There, the presence of Arab and Indian Sunni Muslims enabled the flow of ideas that led to shared involvement in the Salafi intellectual initiatives that were being transmitted via Arabic publications from Egypt.Footnote 62 In many respects, such Salafi reforms, and the attempted inter-ethnic alliances they sought to promote among purified fellow Muslims, were themselves a direct response to the heterotopic encounter with a plurality of other Muslims, each following different versions of Islam. However, the Salafi response was not to ecumenically celebrate such differences, but instead to remove them through returning to a religious common denominator by way of the faith of the first Muslims they revered as al-salaf al-salih (“the pious ancestors”). The promotion of Salafism by journals and organizations was thus an innately conflictual process that further contributed to boundary-maintenance on the one hand and identification with religious rather than ethnic ancestors in the distant Islamic homeland of the Hijaz.
What we have seen so far shows how the convergence on Zanzibar of transoceanic and transregional distribution networks for printed materials strongly contributed to a “diaspora moment,” pace Chan, by perpetuating diasporic characteristics of homeland orientation and boundary-maintenance among Zanzibar’s varied Arab residents. We will see these general tendencies again as we turn now to the spread of Indian print networks in East Africa.
Indian diasporic promoters of public polemic
Developments in Dar es Salaam, the port city in British-ruled Tanganyika that was even closer to Zanzibar than Mombasa, reveal similar connections and contrasts with Zanzibar. In 1926, after relocating to Tanganyika from Zanzibar, the Indian Sunni Mohammad Omar Abbasi (c. 1900–61) cofounded the influential Anjuman Islamiyya (“Islamic Association”).Footnote 63 A graduate of India’s modernist Aligarh Muslim University, Abbasi was by no means sympathetic to Swahili religious customs. Hence, he dedicated himself to the inherently conflictual cause of uplifting East Africa’s Swahili Sunni Muslims while at the same time reforming their local religious traditions. Abbasi’s organization also pursued polemics against other communities, at different times voicing hostility to Shi‘i Isma‘ili and Hindu merchants, and other non-Muslims whom Abbasi regarded as encroaching onto what he regarded as East Africa’s ancestrally Muslim territory.Footnote 64 A journalist by profession in the expanding diasporic publics created by Indian immigration and imported print technology, Abbasi published a series of inflammatory articles about fellow Indian Shi‘is in journals published in the Gujarati language.Footnote 65
On the grounds that Tanganyika’s two Indian newspapers, the Tanganyika Opinion and Tanganyika Herald, were both owned and edited by Gujarati Hindus, in 1932 Abbasi launched a rival communal paper, Al-Muslim (“The Muslim”). It was devoted “entirely for the service of Islam,” albeit of course to the particular vision of Sunni Islam that he sought to propagate.Footnote 66 There was no notion here of learning from, nor even about, the religiosity of Africans themselves. Rather, this was a case of Indians teaching the “correct” form of Islam to other Indians in Africa, or Africans who followed corrupted versions of the faith. Yet once again, while these publications were likely imported to Zanzibar, they were not printed there directly. Similar attitudes were apparent in the activities of the East African Muslim Welfare Society, founded by Indian Khojas and Bohras in Kampala in 1937 before moving to Mombasa in 1945, whose Swahili publications “advocated for an Islam shorn of much of its African particularities.”Footnote 67
While Abbasi harbored hopes of building a coalition between Indian Sunnis and the Swahili and Arab Sunnis of the region, by the time he launched Al-Muslim economic exchanges had already done too much damage to Indian relations with the dwindling Arab elite. Even though Al-Muslim voiced pro-Muslim (and anti-Hindu) sentiments, it was printed in the Gujarati and English that Abbasi knew from his Indian upbringing rather than in the Swahili or Arabic of the region’s African and Arab Muslims. So, in view of the presence of so many Indian Muslims in Zanzibar, it is important to try to gauge to what degree, if any, they participated in the Arabic-based public whose parallel development coincided with the Indian economic ascendancy on the island. Yet in contrast to places such as Mecca, Aden, and Cairo, where numerous Indians participated in Arabic religious scholarship during this period, researchers have yet to find evidence of similar Indian engagement with the various strands of Ibadi, Sunni, or Twelver Shi‘i intellectual life on Zanzibar.Footnote 68 This apparent lack of engagement demands some form of explanation.
The answer may be found in the socio-religious profile of the Indian merchant groups who settled on Zanzibar. Of all India’s Muslim communities, the Khoja Isma‘ilis who made up the majority of Zanzibar’s Indians were the least engaged with the Arabic books and journals being imported from the Middle East, and even less with the Ibadi texts being published by the Sultanate Press on Zanzibar itself. At a time when various Indian Muslim institutions – such as Lucknow’s Nadwat al-‘Ulama – were increasingly interacting with Egypt (and the Maldive Islands) through reading or writing for journals like al-Manar, the Khojas were far more focused on the Indian headquarters of their imam, the Aga Khan, from whose port-based presses their distinct legal and theological works were issued, mainly in dialects of Gujarati rather than Arabic. As for the breakaway Twelver Shi‘i Khojas, as we have seen, they increasingly looked to senior clerics in the holy cities of Iraq for education and guidance. And so, between Bombay, Zanzibar, and the Shi‘i cities of Iraq, polemical pamphlets were exchanged between the Khoja Isma‘ili followers of the Aga Khans and the Khoja followers of the grand Shi‘i clerics of Iraq, who were increasingly interacting with the Indian Ocean’s intersecting diasporic publics.Footnote 69
However, rather than engage with the Ibadi or Sunni publications, Zanzibar’s Isma‘ili Khojas maintained their own literary networks that saw Isma‘ili texts being printed in India for the Khoja merchant diasporas in Zanzibar and other ports around the ocean. Collections of the farmans (“rulings”) of their imam, the Aga Khan, were regularly published and exported from Bombay’s official Khoja Sindhi Chhapakhanu (printing house).Footnote 70 These farmans comprised rulings and sermons directed to East Africa’s Khojas, which the Aga Khans delivered orally in either Persian, Urdu, or English, had translated into Gujarati, then published in Bombay for distribution across the Isma‘ili diaspora.Footnote 71 Despite the fact that Kachchhi remained the predominant spoken mother tongue of East African’s Khojas, the increasing importance to them of written Gujarati as both a liturgical and commercial language meant that Arabic became less important than it was for other Muslims around the Indian Ocean in this period, not least those impacted by printed works emanating from Zanzibar and Cairo. Again, we see how diasporic print served as a mechanism for boundary-maintenance.
Khoja publications in Gujarati imposed not only a linguistic border but also an orthographic barrier with their Ibadi and Sunni Arab neighbors. For rather than the Arabic script used for Arabic and Swahili Muslim texts (and indeed, occasionally for Gujarati), Khoja publications used a version of the Devanagari script, or else the Khojki script to print older religious texts. Even going to school on Zanzibar did little to remove these barriers between discrete publics, because Indian schools such as the Khoja-dominated Sir Euan Smith Madrasa taught primarily through Gujarati and English rather than Arabic or Swahili.
While there were certainly Khoja scholars who were perfectly at ease in Arabic, they comprised a small learned class whose members were not present in any significant number among the merchant diaspora on Zanzibar. Even those that were present on Zanzibar as leaders of the Khoja jama‘atkhana (house of worship) had little cause to read the Ibadi legal and theological texts being published by the Sultanate Press, still less imported Salafi journals such as al-Manar – except perhaps with alarm. Because Rashid Rida, the Egypt-based editor of al-Manar, penned numerous tirades against Shi‘is and also used his journal to publish many polemical munazara (“debates”) with Shi‘i scholars.Footnote 72 Once again, print created social boundaries – even in jama‘atkhanas and mosques that were notionally spaces for maintaining communal unity.
So, while the patronage of Zanzibar’s Arab sultans saw Arabic (and especially Ibadi) religious scholarship flourish in the Protectorate, the separate Arabic and Gujarati publics pursued parallel courses that rarely overlapped. Even if Ibadi and Sunni Arabs and Khoja Gujaratis were aware of each other’s books, they do not appear to have made use of them (though this is certainly a topic for closer comparative study). In short, there seems to have been little sharing of ideas between these linguistically and orthographically separate publics that converged on Zanzibar, still less ecumenical attempts to understand or reconcile their quite distinct visions of Islam (not to mention the Hindu and Zoroastrian traditions of other Indian merchants and bureaucrats who resided in the protectorate). Maintained by their separate mosques and communal associations, sectarian borders kept Isma‘ili, Ibadi, Sunni, and Twelver intellectual life not only quite separate on Zanzibar itself, but linked to quite different networks across the ocean, whether to the Sunni ‘ulama of the Hadramawt, the Ibadi diaspora in Oman and Libya, the Shi‘i mujtahids of Iraq, or the Khojas’ Aga Khan and the Bohras’ Da‘i in Bombay.
While the common use of Arabic, and shared connections to the Sultan’s bureaucracy did engender a certain amount of intellectual (albeit sometimes disputational) exchange between Ibadi and Sunni Arabs, there seems to have been no equivalent Arab or Swahili engagement on Zanzibar with the Isma‘ili version of Islam followed by the wealthy Gujarati Khojas. Insofar as Indian formulations of Islam did attract attention, they apparently did so by means of an Arabic polemic against Ahmadiyya Muslims published by an Indian scholar and at some point imported to Zanzibar.Footnote 73 The Ahmadiyya would later become the focus of further polemics from Swahili scholars after the Indian Ahmadi missionary Mubarak ‘Ali moved to Mombasa in 1934, where he subsequently published a controversial Swahili translation of the Quran.Footnote 74
If Zanzibar’s Indians seem not to have engaged with the substantial Arabic- and smaller Swahili-based publics that emerged in parallel to their own, then this in turn raises the question of the content and contours of the Indian diasporic public on Zanzibar. Once again, the overwhelming dominance of Gujaratis created a distinct linguistic and intellectual habitus on Zanzibar. Although many Gujaratis were able to read Urdu, and in a few cases Arabic, most of the Indians on Zanzibar were better served by their own publications in Gujarati and English, such as the Samachar newspaper printed in Zanzibar’s main port, Stone Town.Footnote 75 Although the Samachar Press in Zanzibar may also have printed Gujarati books that have not yet come to light, for the most part Zanzibar’s Indians relied on the far larger Gujarati publishing houses of Bombay and to some extent the princely state of Kachchh in Gujarat. Back in the 1820s, Bombay’s first Indian-operated lithographic press had been owned by Gujarati merchants. And in the century that followed, Bombay’s role as the grand clearing house of Gujarati commerce led to further investments in printing a rich variety of Gujarati texts, both sacred and secular, that were distributed across the Indian Ocean to the Khoja trade diaspora in a way that paralleled the printing and exporting of Arabic-script Tamil books from the Indian port of Madras.Footnote 76 But those Gujarati texts were unable to draw together common readerships around the ocean.
The same was true for the other sites of Gujarati publishing beyond Bombay, particularly the port of Bhavnagar to which Zanzibar was closely linked by trading ships. It was there that Gulamali Isma‘il (1864–1943), one of the most important of Gujarati print entrepreneurs, established his Khoja Ithna‘ashari Electric Printing Press around 1890.Footnote 77 Amid the sectarian struggles between Isma‘ili and Ithna‘ashari (i.e., Twelver Shi‘i) Khojas that we have seen growing in the late nineteenth century, Isma‘il made a pilgrimage to the Shi‘i holy cities of Iraq, where the Grand Ayatollah Aqa Shaykh Muhammad Husayn urged him to propagate Twelver Shi‘ism through print. In the years that followed, Gulamali Isma‘il vigorously promoted Twelver doctrines among his fellow Khojas by publishing more than four hundred religious texts in Gujarati on Twelver Shi‘i law, doctrine, and theology.
In 1893, Gulamali Isma‘il inaugurated Rahenajat (“Path to Salvation”), the first Twelver Khoja journal, followed by cheap editions of Do’aono Majmu’o (“Compendium of Prayers”), an all-in-one liturgical text that served as the ritual vade mecum for Zanzibar’s Twelver Khojas.Footnote 78 First published in the early twentieth century and never published in Africa itself, in line with Gulamali Isma‘il’s larger mission, the Do’aono Majmu’o sought to reform Khoja religious practices by shifting them towards conformity with Middle Eastern Shi‘i norms and away from both the older regional traditions of Gujarat and the more recent rulings of the Aga Khans.Footnote 79 Here in Gujarati was a parallel to what we have seen emerging in the separate Sunni Arabic current of Zanzibar’s publics by way of the spread of journal-based Salafi reform.
Gulamali Isma‘il went on to become the first person to publish a Quran that was fully transliterated into Gujarati script.Footnote 80 However, this too generated public controversy that spread as far as India, East Africa, and Iraq. In a vivid reminder of the ways in which language and script were regarded less as vehicles of cosmopolitan contact than as markers of difference, one of the most consistent rebukes of Gulamali Isma‘il’s translation was that he had rendered the Quran into the language of unbelievers.Footnote 81
Despite the spread of such contentious religious debates, the case for controversy in Zanzibar’s parallel and multilingual publics should not be overstated. Even intra-Muslim printed disputes seem to have been less intense than in formal colonies, such as India, Ceylon, and Burma.Footnote 82 The impact of the messianic Indian Ahmadiyya Muslim movement provides a specific point of contrast. In 1896, Ahmadiyya missionaries also preached across the western Indian coastal region of Kerala, provoking opposition from local Muslim religious leaders that worked its way into the Madras High Court, where in 1919 the Ahmadiyya’s right to practice and preach as Muslims was recognized under colonial law. Moreover, by the 1900s, the Ahmadiyya were sending their missionaries to other British and Dutch colonies around the Indian Ocean, including Burma (now Myanmar), Malaya (now Malaysia), and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). By the 1910s, the Ahmadiyya were also embroiled in a lengthy legal battle on the British island colony of Mauritius for control of the Rose Hill Masjid, the island’s largest mosque funded by Gujarati Memon merchants in 1863.Footnote 83 After the Ahmadiyya lost control of the Mauritius mosque, their first missionaries were in turn sent to East Africa – albeit not Zanzibar, where the Ahmadiyya were apparently not allowed to preach or print.
Hence, in 1917 the first Ahmadiyya association in East Africa was established on the mainland by the Punjabi migrant Sultan Muhammad Khan and followed in 1930 by the first Ahmadiyya mosque in East Africa, which also lay far beyond the Sultan of Zanzibar’s dominions: in Nairobi. Since by this time the British East Africa Protectorate had become the colony of Kenya, fuller legal rights to religious freedom allowed the Ahmadiyya to operate in such interior towns as Nairobi.Footnote 84 But by the same token, other religious propagandists were also free to operate there. So, in response to Ahmadi proselytizing in East Africa, the Hindu missionary organization Arya Samaj began issuing its own counter-propaganda in Urdu, which in turn led to the spread of the kinds of polemical public debates (munazara) that had already been exported in print from India to Ceylon and Burma.Footnote 85 However, these developments characterized the British East African mainland rather than Zanzibar, whose Protectorate status apparently limited the negative socio-religious consequences of more liberal publics in which printed debates had become increasingly contentious by the 1930s.
Print, public and Zanzibar’s legal duopoly
Such printed polemics bring us to the question of the legal basis of press freedom on Zanzibar – and possible restrictions thereof. This question of law is important not only because of the shaping role of law for all printed publics, from the most liberal to the most censored. It is also important because of the attention paid to legal contexts in the formative Habermasian scholarship on public spheres.Footnote 86 However, on Zanzibar, the role of law in allowing or restricting access to particular printed materials was complicated by the Omani-British legal duopoly that emerged midway through the period under scrutiny with the onset of the British Protectorate in 1890. In principle, the Protectorate originally envisaged two spheres of legal jurisdiction: colonial Indian law under the British bureaucracy for Indians, Europeans, and other imperial subjects and Islamic law under the Sultan’s bureaucracy for Arabs and Swahilis considered subjects of the Sultan.Footnote 87 But over time, the two jurisdictions increasingly overlapped, with British officials devising and adjudicating laws that also related to subjects of the Sultan.Footnote 88
The colonial Indian legal background is important here. In India, press freedoms had initially been established by the Metcalfe Press Act of 1835, which allowed publishers to print books and newspapers freely without pre-publication censorship so long as they registered their addresses with a local magistrate.Footnote 89 Subsequent laws attempted to draw back some of these freedoms in response to specific crises, whether the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 (intended to restrict criticism of colonial policies regarding the Second Anglo-Afghan War) or the Indian Press Act of 1910 (intended to curb what were considered radical nationalist voices). During the first few decades of the British Protectorate over Zanzibar, the Indian Penal Code and Code of Civil Procedure already therefore articulated a series of rights and restrictions. However, the consolidation of the Protectorate saw specific laws established for Zanzibar.Footnote 90 A brief summary of relevant laws – at least those enacted by 1922, when Sir Thomas Symonds Tomlinson (then assistant judge in Zanzibar) compiled his comprehensive Laws of Zanzibar – may be helpful to future researchers.Footnote 91
From 1890 until around 1910, the vast majority of these new laws concerned the emancipation of slaves and then economic matters pertaining to customs and market regulations.Footnote 92 The Protectorate had no specific press laws till 1914 when, as in India, laws for “press censorship” (and corresponding “postal censorship”) were enacted to prevent the spread of German war propaganda, which was all the more important on Zanzibar given the presence of a German consulate and merchant community and the proximity to German East Africa (Tanganyika).Footnote 93 With the signing of the Armistice in 1919, both laws were repealed.Footnote 94 While there were no other explicit press or censorship laws, several other laws were issued during the 1910s that contained clauses relating to printed materials.
The earliest of these was the Customs Decree of 1911, which banned the importing of “indecent or obscene literature, prints, paintings, photographs, books, cards, lithographic or any other indecent goods of any description whatsoever, and all seditious, scandalous, or demoralizing printed matter of any description whatsoever.”Footnote 95 The initial part of this clause may well have been a response to the spread of pornographic photographic postcards (for which the ports of the Suez Canal became notorious), the latter part had clear implications for the circulation of books.Footnote 96
The Penal Decree of 1917, which applied to everyone in Zanzibar (including subjects of the Sultan), had several laws intended to avoid the kinds of intercommunal conflict that was affecting major Indian cities at the time, not least Bombay.Footnote 97 One of these new laws proscribed Offences Relating to Religion – including “uttering words, etc, with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings” – though the law did not expressly mention the press.Footnote 98 However, the law proscribing Offences Against the Public Tranquility seems to have had wider potential scope, relating to “whosoever by words, either spoken or written … promotes or attempts to promote feelings of enmity between different classes of His Majesty’s Subjects.”Footnote 99 The punishment was either a fine or up to two years in prison. It remains for future researchers to investigate whether these new Zanzibar laws were enacted to keep pace with changes in Indian law or were instead attempts to placate the ruling Omani Ibadi elite and suppress intercommunal tensions on Zanzibar.
The interrelationship between these Protectorate laws and the Indian Code of Civil Procedure and Indian Penal Code demand the skills and attention of a legal historian, as does their practical application and case history on Zanzibar. Archives and law reports from the British Consular Court and High Court in Zanzibar may record cases of these laws being applied to printed materials, while the records of the Supreme Court of His Highness the Sultan might contain case records based on the application of Shari‘a rulings to printed texts.
As an independent Omani Arab state that became a British Protectorate eleven years after Sultan Barghash founded his Sultanate Press, Zanzibar in some respects combined the more censored printed publics of the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and Afghanistan with their more liberal counterparts in British colonies in which printed religious polemics were given far more freedom to circulate.Footnote 100 Zanzibar’s relative sectarian harmony may therefore have reflected its distinct status as a British protectorate that was still formally ruled by an Omani Arab dynasty, fostering a distinct legal, political, and diplomatic environment from India and other formal colonies. The continuation of the sultans’ authority and legal system may also have limited the legal possibilities for proselytizing, since after arriving in Zanzibar in 1864, the Christian Universities’ Mission to Central Africa limited its activities to formerly enslaved people rather than proselytizing to the island’s Arab and Swahili Muslims. As historian Valerie Hoffman has concluded after studying many Zanzibari sources from the period we have surveyed, “it was considered bad form – as well as politically dangerous – to discuss religiously divisive issues.”Footnote 101
Ultimately, the role of the Arab-British duopoly and its corresponding legal pluralism in shaping the contours of Zanzibar’s diasporic publics requires much more research. As do the gendered dimensions of these publics. For while female participation in print is not immediately apparent – especially in the current secondary literature – researchers have shown the profound degree to which gender inflected both participation in law and public life beyond print.Footnote 102 Elke Stockreiter has shown how during the Protectorate era Zanzibar’s Islamic courts served as a vehicle for female agency through the recognition of women as legal persons and economic actors.Footnote 103 Since this impacted not only the “private” realm of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, but also such “public” matters as wealth management and debt, it raises the possibility that such cases were reported in newspapers as well as printed court rulings.
The degree to which diasporic print engaged with the local oral sphere on Zanzibar – and its far greater female and African participation – is another important question. For, as Laura Fair has shown, from the early twentieth century female performers of taarab songs on social, economic, and political topics became an increasingly prominent feature of public life on Zanzibar.Footnote 104 Between 1928 and 1930, the Zanzibari taarab singer Siti binti Saad (c. 1880–1950) recorded around a hundred songs on gramophone discs.Footnote 105 Like many of the texts we have discussed, Siti’s songs were recorded in Bombay for distribution in East Africa and by just 1931 nearly 72,000 copies had been sold. The unknown extent to which such records and performances registered in print – especially as a shared focus of attention between different communities – has important implications for Zanzibar’s public culture at large.
Conclusions
By tracing the spread of print technology, the development of multilingual publics, the importing of books and journals, and the introduction of printed disputes between the 1860s and 1930s, we have seen that Zanzibar’s discrete diasporic publics had much in common with those of other port cities of the Indian Ocean. But we have also seen how specific features of the polity and society of the Protectorate shaped how access to print on Zanzibar remained restricted to particular groups and their chosen languages and topics, whether the Christian Swahili works issued by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa Press, Ibadi Arabic works issued by the Sultanate Press, or Indian mercantile news reports issued by the Samachar Press. This scenario fostered publics which were both porous and confined: porous through the importing of printed matter from Egypt and India but confined through the Sultan’s monopoly over Arabic printing and the limited development of Swahili printing (especially on Muslim topics).
Discrete, multilingual, and diasporic, Zanzibar’s print networks exported Arabic books promoting Ibadism and imported Arabic books and journals promoting Sunnism and Salafism. Romanized Swahili Christian texts were both printed on Zanzibar and later imported via Mombasa, while Gujarati Isma‘ili, Hindu, and Zoroastrian works were shipped in from Bombay and Bhavnagar. Books and journals were imported to Zanzibar from other printing centers too, bringing further ripples of disputation. Least represented in Zanzibar’s fractured printed publics was Arabic-script Swahili and the local religious traditions of the island’s majority population. These local “print-poor” communities comprising Swahili, Hadimu, Tumbatu, and Pemba were thus excluded from Zanzibar’s new print-based publics. While access to print disproportionately elevated the diasporic consciousness of some groups on Zanzibar between the 1860s and 1930s, the implication is therefore that other groups – especially print-poor African communities – did not develop such homeland orientations, even though their enslaved past meant their places of ancestry also lay far from Zanzibar. When Swahili printing was eventually taken up outside missionary circles in the 1920s and 30s, it was used by colonial educationalists and Muslim reformists as a vehicle for projects of educational uplift and religious reform that actively undermined traditional local knowledge and religious practice.Footnote 106 Or else, it saw descendants of enslaved Africans develop an oceanic diasporic identity as Shirazis that imitated that of Zanzibar’s privileged communities rather than recovered ties to the interior of the African continent.Footnote 107
If Zanzibar’s multilingual and diasporic publics were cosmopolitan, then unequal access to print meant these publics were also correspondingly exclusionary. Until at least the 1930s, the Protectorate’s printed publics had an asymmetrical relationship with its mass population. In characterizing Zanzibar’s printed publics as being not only multilingual and diasporic but also separate in the sense of being separated in sociolinguistic and sectarian terms, this article finally raises questions about the meaning of “public” in such contexts. A diasporic printed public could serve as a mechanism of boundary-maintenance as much as interaction, for identifying with distant people and places of a notional homeland more than with local neighbors from other communities. Rather than conceptually unify the writers and readers of texts published in different languages and scripts – and which in many cases promoted the theological doctrines of rival sects or the professional interests of separate communities – the model of discrete diasporic publics highlights divergences in the different reading publics of Zanzibar. Positioning the rise of new printed publics as a “diaspora moment,” pace Chan, “in which reconnections with a putative homeland take place,” therefore allows us to demarcate a distinct period in the longue durée of Indian Ocean interactions.Footnote 108
What we have seen therefore suggests that the convergence on Zanzibar of transoceanic and transregional distribution networks for printed materials perpetuated diasporic characteristics of homeland orientation and boundary-maintenance among Zanzibar’s various Arab, Indian, and eventually, to a lesser extent, Swahili residents. In other words, multilingual and multiscript print communication promoted centrifugal modes of identification with distant places and people rather than centripetal modes of identification with East Africa and its indigenous or otherwise African populations.
This looks strikingly different from the original definition of a public sphere by Jürgen Habermas as the social realm “in which something approaching public opinion can be formed” and to which “access is guaranteed to all citizens.”Footnote 109 By contrast, Zanzibar’s publics were not only plural and discrete but also exclusive, especially for the print-poor African majority population. And, returning to Huber and Osterhammel’s criterion for a public, Zanzibar’s multiple printed languages and scripts beg the question of whether there was any “common focus of attention” as distinct from separate communal, sectarian, or other specific focuses of concern.Footnote 110 Only close and comparative readings of contemporaneous texts can reveal whether print technology served to focus or divert the attention of Zanzibar’s diverse inhabitants. The causes and consequences of such collective concentration or distraction are even larger questions, albeit ones that render a small East African island a productive case-study for larger world historical problems.
Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to the anonymous readers of this article for their generous and productive feedback.
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